Rowing in Eden (11 page)

“Man, Artie!” Darren Rutiger rocked back onto his elbows and raised his face to the trees and the sky overhead. “Here we sit with our old friend Franny, and she's giving us the lowdown on her big sister's sex life, and we're drinking her dad's primo bourbon! Who says we didn't go to the damn party?”

How jubilant he was! While Franny was miserable. Not only had she betrayed Martie, the boys—at least Darren—seemed to think she had offered them the bourbon as a blow against Brick.
I only brought it because I felt sorry for you.
That was what she wanted to say, but that wasn't the whole truth, either. She wanted them to like her, too. She was preposterous. She was—

Darren Rutiger threw a twig at her shoulder. “So, Franny, that booze got you feeling tight, babe?”

“Tight” was not the right word. She did not mean to give him the right word—which was more like “loose,” and so she said, making her voice as casual and steady as possible, “No, but I've got to go now. You guys can—just take those glasses with you. My mom'll think they got broken, or something.”

“Aw.” Darren made a little boy's pout that he was handsome enough to get away with. “So
you
want us to leave, too?” He stood, then, and pulled her into his chest, which did feel nice, so big and solid and warm, the soft scuff of his cotton shirt against her cheek—

“Say good night, Darren,” said Artie Stokes.

“All right, all right.” Darren raised his hands in the air, like a man being held up, and Franny began to back away through the foxtail toward the clipped lawn and the drive.

“Good to see you guys,” she said.

“Right.” Darren Rutiger picked up his glass from the slab, raised it her way. “We'll never forget you for this, babe!”

Artie Stokes lifted his glass, too. “To old pals.”

“But, hey, hey, hey”—Darren Rutiger began to laugh—“look who's coming now!”

Martie: hoisting a six-pack of beer over her head, and calling, “It's me!”

To the boys, Franny hissed, “Don't tell about the bourbon.”

Quick, grinning, they set their glasses on the slab behind them; then Darren hurried on ahead of Franny to give Martie a hug considerably more intimate than the one he had given her back at the front door—now, a nuzzle to the neck, the cheek.

“So tell me, Martie,” Darren said, “am I wrong, or is Rozzie getting too big for her britches?”

Martie threw her head back and gave a yip of delight-filled ire. “Wasn't she a perfect bitch? But, Frances Jean, what are
you
doing out here?”

Darren Rutiger winked at Franny as he took Martie's hand and spun her out to arm's length.

“No” was the word Franny mouthed at the boy, and he must have understood what she meant because he stopped looking Franny's way as he gave Martie a second spin.

“You're sure looking good, Martie! Must be that college life. The rest of us gotta slug away at the old job, lug that barge, tote that bale, while you're out breaking the boys' hearts between classes.” He turned to Artie Stokes. “Is that fair, man? We come home and rub Ben-Gay on our sore backs, and Martie, here, is out living the high life?”

Artie laughed and Darren went on, “Hey, Martie, remember the good old days when you'd sit behind me and rub my shoulders while Señor Siquieros told us about his family in old Mejico?”

“Frances Jean, get inside,” Martie said. “Pronto.”

“But, Martie—”

“You want me to tell that you were out here with Darren and Artie after Mother specifically told you to stay upstairs?”

“But—”

“You're not wanted.” Martie pointed toward the house. “
Go
.”

“Hey, you,” a voice called as Franny made her way up the stairs, but another voice—the voice of Richie Craft, she thought—said, “No, man, that's the little sister.”

In her parents' dark bedroom, the only things perfectly visible were the long sleeves of a white shirt on the ironing board—white,
dangling, one on each side of the board: the arms of a man who finally died on that piece of the wreck he had hoped might keep him alive long enough for rescue.

Outside, things were clearer. From the bedroom window, Franny watched Darren Rutiger and Martie make their way down the drive. Artie Stokes stayed behind on the church slab, smoking. Maybe Artie still hoped Rosamund might come out to him. Maybe he saw himself as a kind of watchdog for Darren Rutiger. Or for Martie.

After a while, Artie stood. Worked a beer from the six-pack Martie had brought outside. Punched holes in the top.

Into the closed space she made by cupping her hands over her mouth and nose, Franny breathed her bourbon breath. “I'm a bum,” she whispered. “Dear God, please help me not to be such a bum.”

She still stood watching out the window an hour later when a white station wagon hesitated at the end of the long drive, then turned and parked along the edge of the moon-blond plot that held the single apple tree that remained of the Nearys' old orchard.

The car's driver began to walk toward the Wahl house. A male. Artie Stokes looked up as the newcomer passed but Artie did not call out an hello, and the newcomer did not seem to see Artie. A light-haired boy in a white shirt, khaki Bermudas, loafers. For a dazzling moment, Franny thought: Martie's old ROTC boyfriend, come to make amends!

But, of course, the boy was actually “Eduardo” from Lake Okoboji, and now Eduardo's loafers scuffed the front steps. He rang the doorbell. Folded his hands behind his back. Waited.

Maybe no one would come to the door, the way no one had come to the door for Darren Rutiger and Artie Stokes. Maybe the boy just would—go away.

But maybe not.

Down the stairs Franny pounced. Through the noisy living room and out through the screened porch. She knew the yard, even
in the dark, and made her way along the rim of the bank without trouble, then cut back across the far side of the property and came up from behind the church slab.

“It's just Franny,” she whispered as Artie Stokes flinched. “Sh.”

The scene now unfolding on the front steps included Rosamund, Tim Gleason, and Eduardo (head tilted to one side, hands in his pockets in what Franny suspected he meant to serve as a jaunty pose).

She dug her fingertips into Artie's arm. “What have they been saying?”

He shook his head—“Can't hear”—then Rosamund disappeared inside the house, leaving Tim Gleason and Eduardo on the steps.

“But who's that with Roz?” Artie asked.

“I need to find Martie,” Franny said.

WHIR-OOOOO!
Rosamund stepped out from the front door, the silver emergency siren raised to her lips—
WHIR-OOOOO!—
while Franny made her way across the rough ground to the faded car in which Darren and Artie had arrived.

She knocked on the side of the car. No answer. “Martie?” she whispered. Half-sick, she rose up just high enough to look inside: empty.

WHIR-OOOOO! WHIROOOOooooo!

“Whir-oo!” called a mocking voice out of the dark beyond the end of the drive, and a couple began to take shape there. The girl's head lay on the boy's shoulder. The two appeared wonderfully anonymous. Content. In love. Unfortunately, as they drew closer, they became Darren Rutiger and Martie, using each other for support as they made their drunken way up the drive.

“Martie!” Rosamund called. Her voice scratched a warning into the night sky that was sharp and bright as lightning. “You've got company!”

Martie stopped and woozily disengaged herself from Darren Rutiger. “Eduardo”—
Martie's
voice: It was the bleat of the lamb that quails at the lightning—“is that you?”

Edwardo did not reply.

Moving a little faster now, though her legs seemed hardly sturdy enough to carry her; raking her fingers through her mussed hair, Martie called, “When d'you get here? I about gave up—”

“I guess so,” the boy murmured.

Darren Rutiger, now several paces behind Martie, raised his face to the moon and delivered a wolf howl.

“Darren Rutiger!” Rosamund hurried down the drive, her hands raised in the air. “Get off our property or I'm calling the police!”

“Hey, Roz.” Darren Rutiger reared back a little, but his voice was as smooth as ever. “Get off your high horse. I was with Martie, not you. Hey, Martie—” He broke off as Martie put her hand on the arm of Eduardo, and Eduardo turned aside.

“I mean it, Darren,” Rosamund said.

“I know you do.” Darren considered Martie and Eduardo for another moment, then called, “Hey! What's-your-name! Eduardo!”

“Shut up, Darren,” Artie Stokes murmured, his voice just loud enough that Franny could hear, and when Eduardo did not answer, Darren continued, “Well, whatever your name is, man: Too bad you got here so late.”

It did not occur to Franny that she had covered her eyes until she heard the slap that made her uncover them, and there was Rosamund, shoving at Darren Rutiger, who now held a hand to his cheek. “Get out!” Rosamund shouted. “You are a—nasty person! Nasty! Just—get!”

Which might have been the end of things had Darren Rutiger not begun to laugh at Rosamund. When Darren Rutiger laughed at her, Rosamund kicked him in the shins.

“Hey!” he protested, and then Martie sat down on the front steps and started to cry, and Eduardo, making a sound Franny would have preferred never to have heard, smashed his fist into the lap siding of the old lodge. The cry of pain that followed the blow made something inside her convulse, and, for a second, she thought that Artie Stokes might step into the drive and hit someone or
something himself—there was a shifting in the air alongside her—but, no, after a brief salute to Franny, Artie Stokes headed toward the gray car at the end of the drive, and, then, Darren Rutiger headed that way, too.

Only Franny watched Artie and Darren's departure because Rosamund now was enlisting Tim Gleason and his friend in the white T-shirt to drive Eduardo to the emergency room, quick, someone had to cut off the boy's class ring, the finger was swelling,
Go on, before my parents get home.

Spooky: the number of party guests who now stood just beyond the light from the mercury lamp, looking back and forth between Rosamund in the driveway and Martie on the front steps. Martie, still crying, pushed Mr. Ed away as he tried to lick her salty cheeks.

“Franny,” Rosamund called as Franny made her way down to the drive, “what are you doing out here?”

“I—wanted to help.”

“Good luck.” Rosamund shook her head. “Really, the best thing for you to do would be to get inside in case Mother and Daddy come home.” Rosamund turned to watch the car carrying Eduardo move off down Lakeside. “Go on. Really. I'll try to help Martie settle down in just a minute.”

T
HOUGH THE
W
AHLS' CHURCH ATTENDANCE HAD FALLEN OFF
sharply since their move to the far side of the lake, the next morning, when Franny woke, she instantly felt “Sunday.” Sunshine and moisture had already made the morning as glossy as a photograph, and she found herself thinking of the repentant Baptist campers of the nineteen-fifties, how they would have filed out of the lodge and into the day, made their way across the drive to the little church. Skinny-necked boys in outsize white shirts and ties. Girls in full skirts and straw hats and white gloves. Franny would have appreciated an opportunity to join those girls that morning. To look down at her gloved hands, just as they had, and say the requisite prayers.

On this Sunday morning, the Wahls' out-of-town guests fled the house eagerly and early, rolling up sleeping bags and packing cars before Peg even had a chance to start the brunch.

“What on earth?” Peg said when she came down to the quiet kitchen and found Franny, there, alone with the newspaper. “Did something happen here last night?”

Franny's eyeballs felt parched when she raised them to her mother's face.
Look blasé. Blink, but do not blink too much. Look dumb, but not too dumb. Not infuriatingly dumb.
Her mother knew about the scene with Eduardo? Did not know? This was a test to determine if Franny would tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?

“I was upstairs. If anything happened, how would I know?”

Sickeningly brave, Franny felt. Perhaps witnesses would now
pop out from the broom closet and drag her to a confession.

“You girls”—Peg's smile bristled with bitterness—“you girls are thicker than thieves.”

Keeping the dumb look on her face, Franny moved off to the den where she lay down upon the floor and watched
This Is the Life.
Her sisters made fun of the show's religious slant, but its stories of troubled families seemed more realistic to Franny than most of the stories on television.

Out in the kitchen, Rosamund asked Peg what time they were meeting Brick's mother for lunch at the country club, and Peg complained about Martie being impossible to wake up, and then Martie's voice sounded in the kitchen, too:

“How're my beautiful mother and my beautiful sister on this beautiful Sunday morning?”

Trying to sound chipper, Franny supposed. And to show gratitude to Rosamund for last night's display of loyalty.

Her father, on the other hand, came directly into the den from the stairs, and moaned, “It's hell to grow old, Fran.”

From her spot on the floor, Franny turned to smile at him over her shoulder. He smiled back as he lowered himself onto the creaky leather couch, but he looked terrible—jittery, puffy, pink-eyed. Some mornings, he was sick to his stomach, but no one acknowledged the fact: The faucets ran loud, the toilet flushed, and that was that.

“Hey, girls,” he hollered toward the kitchen, “any coffee out there?”

“Coming right up, sir!” Martie called back.

Martie herself looked a little pasty above the collar of her pink bathrobe, yes, but she had washed her hair and piled it on top of her head in a pink towel. She was making an effort. “Frances Jean,” she said as she carried a clattering cup and saucer toward their father, “I can't believe you watch that garbage.”

Franny pretended not to hear, made no move from her spot on the rug, a hard sisal thing that left a giant paisley pattern on her skin if she lay on the floor for any time at all.

“Awful quiet around here this morning,” Brick said. “Where'd everybody go?”

Martie laughed. “Just sit tight! I'm going to make us a killer pitcher of Bloody Marys! I figure I ought to know how, right, since I learned at the feet of the master?”

On
This Is the Life,
a family with a shoplifting son received sufficient counsel from their pastor that things were looking up by the time the theme song began. The song, and the candle that flickered on the screen while it played, always made Franny's heart hurt in just the way it hurt at certain love songs. Could the singer be Bing Crosby? Franny would have asked Brick what he thought, but Brick despised Bing Crosby, and here came Martie, again, this time pressing the television's off button with a flick of her hip as she carried Brick his Bloody Mary.

“Martie!” Franny protested.

“Sh.” Martie dropped down beside Brick on the couch. “You know what I'd
love
, Dad? To hear you play ‘Satin Doll.'”

“Aw, honey. Not just now.”

“Come on!” Martie hopped to her feet and held out her hands. “Franny, wouldn't you love to hear Dad's ‘Satin Doll'?”

“Sure,” Franny said. Even though she could see her father did not want to play. Because if she did not say,
Sure
, even if he did not want to play, he would feel hurt.

Come on
, Martie mouthed at Franny, and now Martie's eyes jiggled with tears. What did the tears mean? Were they leftovers from the night before?
Cheer him up
, Martie mouthed.

Franny forced herself to her feet and went to join Martie in holding out a hand to Brick, to help him stand.

“For God's sake, girls”—he shook his head—“you think I can't get up by myself?” He stood then, with a grunt, and he called out to Rosamund, just entering the den, “Your sisters, here, seem to have decided I'm some kind of cripple!”

This made Rosamund laugh. “Oh, Daddy,” she said, and she shook her head at her sisters' folly.

That afternoon—why did it always happen that way?—by the time the Wahls arrived at the Pynch Country Club for lunch with Brick's mother, they were twenty-five minutes late.

“And I'm the one she'll blame,” Peg said as the family hurried up the walk.

“Don't be ridiculous.” Brick ran his finger around the collar of his sport shirt. “
I'm
the officially errant son.”

The country club manager—in short-sleeves and tie and fat wristwatch—pointed the family toward the large table where Charlotte Wahl sat waiting on the old dining porch. Stately, dignified, her seamed forehead and nape surrounded by an ever present gray doughnut of hair, Charlotte widened her dark eyes at her son and his family as they wound their way through the linen-covered tables, most of them now empty of the lunch crowd.

“I thought you'd gotten lost,” Charlotte murmured, then offered her cheek to each in turn.

“That's a beautiful suit, Grandma,” Rosamund said, and Brick said, “Yes, indeed! You're looking well, Mother-o-mine!” and he threw a long leg over the back of a Windsor chair—not an entirely graceful move, but he got himself seated, and proceeded to make a show of tucking his napkin into the collar of his shirt. For his mother's benefit. As soon as she sighed in mild dismay, he gaily tossed the napkin onto the table. “Of course, you always do look well, don't you, Ma? Mom? Mother?” He glanced toward the bar. “Where's our boy Jimmy this afternoon?”

“He'll be by,” Charlotte said. “Don't get frantic, dear.”

Brick leaned over the table to screw up one of his bloodshot eyes at his mother. “Do I look frantic, dear?”

Charlotte did not respond to her son's question, but said, “The Brinkleys stopped at the table while I was waiting. They'd had the chicken, and advised against it.”

“Well, well!” With a laugh, Brick pushed back his chair and stood and saluted. “If the Brinkleys advise against the chicken, by God, I shall stand against the chicken!” He winked at Franny. She smiled, then wished she had not when he started off toward the bar.

Charlotte Wahl watched the departure, but did not return the helpless shrug of alliance offered her by Peg.

“Do you think Dad'll get us something, too?” Martie asked. “I'm sure nobody would object if we all had a little wine with our meal—”

“I'd
object,” Charlotte and Peg said in one breath, and Rosamund whispered, “You already had a Bloody Mary, Martie.”

Martie fanned herself with the big menu. “I don't see why you guys eat here, anyway. You always say the food stinks.”

“Martie!” said Rosamund, and Peg did her best to smile at the approaching waiter as she added in an undertone, “We have to use our minimum, Martie.”

“I'd forfeit it,” said Martie.

“Good afternoon, ladies.” The waiter was a tiny boy with pointed ears whom Franny recognized from the newspaper as a high school wrestler.

“So, tell us,” Martie said to the boy, “what does your chef cook
well
?”

A bracing moment, for which Peg apologized to the young man; then, while everyone placed their orders, Brick—scotch in hand—resumed his seat and Charlotte began to explain why Franny really ought to wear her hair tucked behind her ears.

“You don't want to look like an Afghan hound, now do you?” Charlotte said with a chuckle.

“Ruff, ruff!” Franny replied, which made the departing waiter smile, but did not put an end to the matter, no, because Brick agreed with his mother.
She looks like she just crawled out of the sack, doesn't she? Somebody loan that girl a comb!
and this inspired Martie to reach around behind Franny and pull the hair away from Franny's face.

“Better, right?” Martie said. “Right?”

“Stop!” Franny shook her head out of Martie's reach, and though Rosamund gave her a smile of sympathy, Charlotte said, “We're right, though, Fran. For a moment, there, you looked lovely.” She pointed her chin Brick's way. “Have you noticed how much she looks like your cousin Grace, Brick?”

“Grace?”
Franny tried to think who Grace might be.

“A second cousin,” Charlotte said. “You wouldn't have met her, I suppose. She lives off in Texas.”

Nh.
A little noise escaped Brick Wahl's nose.
Nh
. He raised himself up by the arms of his chair and peered down upon the men gathered on the putting green that fanned out below the raised porch.

“Brick?” Peg said. “Your mother asked you a question.”

“Grace.” He shook his head as he resumed his seat. “Christ, she was a character! Remember how she'd complain her breasts were too big? Oh, they made her hot! Oh, she couldn't find clothes that fit right!”

“Harold!” Charlotte Wahl lowered her eyes. “Really—”

“Well, she did!” Brick glanced at the females gathered around the table as if their presence made him itch. “If you ask me, her breasts were the best thing that ever happened to her.”

At this last, Martie gave a gulping laugh and blushed, earning a stare from Peg, who then said “Isn't it”—but switched to a halfhearted, “Here's your soup, Brick.”

“French onion.” With a flourish, the waiter lowered a bowl into place before Brick, then handed salads around to the others.

“I always find that pepper mill business embarrassing,” Franny whispered to Rosamund as the waiter began to make his way around the table. Rosamund nodded, but whispered back, “It's supposed to be part of the charm of service.”

“Say, young man.”

The girls joined the others in turning toward Brick, who was making a horrible face toward the bowl of soup in front of him. “Could somebody in the kitchen actually think I'm fool enough to eat this swill?”

The waiter's smile revealed nubs of teeth, as pitted and gray as rock salt. “If there's something you'd rather do with it, sir,” the waiter said, “please, be my guest.”

“Young man”—Brick raised his reddened eyelids at the boy—“don't tempt me.”

Charlotte, Peg, Rosamund, and Franny looked down at their
plates, but Martie darted a hand across the table. “Let me taste it, Dad,” she said. “I'm a connoisseur of onion soup.”

“What?”
Brick laid his hands over the top of the soup bowl. “For God's sake, I said it was awful!”

“Mr. Wahl?” The manager appeared from behind the waiter. “Is there a problem?”

“Would you say it's a problem if your soup tastes like piss, and your waiter's a smart-ass?”

At a distance, the manager conferred with the waiter, then returned to substitute a salad for the offending soup and to introduce a new server.

It was Rosamund who broke the silence that followed by announcing that she knew a game they could play. “Wait.” She rooted around in her bag for a pen and a cocktail napkin she said she had brought home from Mike Zanios's Top Hat Club.

“Here it is!” She held up a napkin containing a sketch: pouty lips, pouf of blond hair falling into big, doe eyes.

“What's that?” Peg asked.

“It's Roz!” Franny said. “Can't you tell? A caricature. Did Mike Zanios draw it?”

Rosamund nodded. “But it's the back I want you to see. We were playing this game called ‘word golf.' See how it works? In this one, we performed a miracle! One letter at a time, we changed ‘blood' to ‘wine'! Well, ‘
wines
.' Mike thought of that.”

“You guys have so much fun together!” Martie said. “Let's you and I go to the Top Hat, Roz! Sometime this week!”

Rosamund smiled off out the window. “You wouldn't think Mike was in his forties,” she said. “I mean, he's read Hemingway. And Camus.”

Charlotte Wahl gave a dry laugh. “Dear, I'm practically an antique, and I've read Hemingway and Camus. Your grandfather read Hemingway, and no doubt your father did, too.” She cocked an eye at Brick—just then chewing hard on a bite of dinner roll and looking around the dining porch like a bored boy.

“Isn't he the one who blew his brains out?” Peg asked.

Rosamund nodded. “He'd developed a tragic view of life.”

“Puh!” Brick stood up from the table. “He couldn't write anymore. That's what I heard.” Brick picked up his drink and moved off to the upright piano at the rear of the porch.